For Satellite Program 8, Arin’s research recalls the intensification of Franco-Thai relations during the parallel reigns of King Rama IV (1851–68) and Emperor Napoleon III (1852–70), a period marked by the expansion of the European colonial enterprise in much of the geographic region known today as Southeast Asia. Siam became the only nation in the region to escape official colonial rule, a legacy that inspires pride but also debate. In a little-known diplomatic gesture, Rama IV, known in the West as King Mongkut (meaning “crown” in Thai) copied his inherited crown and offered the replica to Napoleon III by a Siamese ambassador in an elaborate ceremony at the Château de Fontainebleau on June 27, 1861. With the video installation and sculpture Mongkut, Arin puts the crown – one of Thailand’s cherished symbolic forms – at the axis of his inquiry. Arin’s delicate approach layers public and private, past and present, original and copy – deliberately offering novel yet partial tales of Thailand’s qualified sovereignty.
 
Arin Rungjang was born 1975 in Bangkok, where he lives and works today. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Silpakorn University in 2002, including one year in the atelier of Christian Boltanski at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris, in 2000. He is known for deftly revisiting historical material and overlapping major and minor narratives across multiple times, places, and languages. His interest lies in lesser-known aspects of Thai history and their intersection with the present in the sites and contexts of his practice. Objects, which can draw together distant events across time and space, are central to his investigations.His recent exhibitions and projects include “The Way Things Go,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA (2015), “Parasophia,” Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture, Japan (2015), “Streamlines,” Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2015), “Signature Art Prize Finalists Exhibition,” Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2015), “FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia,” SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Pen, Cambodia, and ST PAUL ST Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2014), “Golden Teardrop,” Thai Pavilion, the 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013), and “All Our Relations,” 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012).

The Jeu de Paume’s Satellite program devoted to contemporary art was initiated in 2007. In 2015, the Jeu de Paume and the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux are jointly organizing the eighth in this series of exhibitions, which from the outset have been entrusted to curators of international renown (Fabienne Fulchéri, María Inés Rodríguez, Elena Filipovic, Raimundas Malašauskas, Filipa Oliveira, Mathieu Copeland and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez).
The latest series, called “Enter the Stream at the Turn” and curated by Erin Gleeson, highlights select practices in Southeast Asia through four solo exhibitions featuring the artists Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), Arin Rungjang (Thailand), Khvay Samnang (Cambodia) and Nguyen Trinh Thi (Vietnam). Their channels of resistance involve the moving image realized both within and against a complex inheritance of cultural and historical occupation and censorship.
Each exhibition is accompanied by a publication that was conceived as a carte blanche for the artists. This series of books, each of which was created in close collaboration with a graphic design agency, forms an independent artistic space within the Satellite program.

This book is published on the occasion of Arin Rungjang’s exhibition “Mongkut,” held at the Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz, Nogent-sur-Marne, as part of the Jeu de Paume’s extramural program, from March 19 to May 17, 2015 and at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux from May 29 to September 6, 2015 under the patronage of Alain Juppé, Mayor of Bordeaux, President of Bordeaux métropole, former Prime Minister, and Fabien Robert, deputy mayor, in charge of Culture and Heritage.

This exhibition is part of “Enter the Stream at the Turn” ( Vandy Rattana, Arin Rungjang, Khvay Samnang and Nguyen Trinh Thi ), curated by Erin Gleeson for the Satellite Program 8.